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Ill Met by moonlight

Robin Holloway

Wednesday, 23rd April 2008

Robin Holloway on when good opera is ruined by tack presentation

What the Met now offers — shoves, rather — goes way beyond modest usefulness or harmless diversion. Already before curtain-up the hackles are offended and the artistic anticipations rebuffed. And as for curtain-down! Within seconds of the music’s end the obtrusive voices are ‘reacting’, their panting promptness precluding any private, measured response in a gulping gush of ‘appreciation’. Then come chats with singers, dressers, scenery and lighting boys, charladies, etc. — cosy backstage ‘human interest’ (yawn) just in case Tristan or Lucia (or whatever) doesn’t suffice. Worst is when some casually passing prima donna drops in on the star of the live performance for a brief exercise in heavy mutual petting. The tacky hyperbole of these luvvie love-ins beats anything I’ve heard elsewhere or seen in print; nothing is too vapid or sycophantic for these shameless folk. Back again to the regular presenters with their unquenchable banality — the language is so commercialised, now, in this temple of high art, as to make the English audience hanker for the straightforward, honest advertising breaks that aren’t transmitted over here!

Lucia, relatively short, made a long broadcast. I didn’t measure the proportions, but the fragile barque was clearly overwhelmed with gunk — before, during, after. Tristan, vulnerable in different ways, was harder to sink, though the new Met style did its damnedest. Each devastating act-close — the lovers in each others’ arms at last after the turn-of-the-screw intensity by which the bonds separating them have been eroded, greeted by the lawful husband-to-be in a blaze of brass under the sullen eyes of the hostile sailors; the lovers’ ardent mutual defiance of law, decorum, fate, when their tryst has been betrayed, the wronged husband has sounded his woes, and Tristan let himself be pierced on his jealous rival’s cowardly sword-thrust; the billowing synaesthesiac hymn to love-in-death and eternal shared consummation beyond the grave as Isolde sings her Liebestod — all were instantaneously cheapened, sold short by the hard sell, set at nought, effaced.